Acupuncture works by restoring balance in the body’s systems—relieving pain, calming the nervous system, and creating the conditions where healing can happen.

The science is clear: acupuncture reduces stress, regulates the immune response, and helps the body shift from survival mode into repair mode. But beyond the research, the real power of acupuncture is in what it allows—a return to yourself. A moment where your body is no longer just a problem to be fixed, but something whole, something listening, something alive.

Poetry is another way in.

Just as acupuncture works with the body’s natural intelligence, poetry bypasses the thinking mind and speaks to something deeper. It is language that doesn’t ask for agreement but for recognition. It is a way of listening—not just to words, but to yourself.

These poems are not instructions. They are not solutions. They are invitations—to presence, to awareness, to the experience of being fully alive.

Some poems have preambles — thresholds to walk through before entering.  Others begin the moment you arrive. Read one, read many, or read none at all today.  This is not a collection to get through, but a space to return to, as needed.

Somewhere here, something may meet you where you are. Not as an answer, but as presence.

Take your time.  Read aloud if you can.  Listen for what lingers. Listen to them the way you would listen to your own breath, your own heartbeat.

If you wish, pair them with music or with silence. See what they reveal to you.

And above all, remember: healing is not something done to you to fix you.

It is something you must learn to inhabit.

Sign up for Monthly Poems from Gord

Words have the power to heal, to reveal, to bring us back to ourselves.

Each month, receive a new poem by Gord exploring being, health, and healing—not as answers or solutions, but as invitations.  To listen. To pause. To step more fully into your life. Sign up here for Gord’s poetry from our Contact Page.

Copyright & Sharing

These poems are my gift for reading, reflection, and personal experience. They may not be used for commercial purposes or reproduced for profit. If you wish to publish or share them beyond personal use, you must first request permission. If approved, attribution to the author and a link back to this website will be required.

Copyright © [2025] Gordon Grant. All rights reserved.

This Is Not A Poem

This is not a poem.
You are not reading lines
meant to move you,
meant to change you
meant to pull you inward.

This is not a gravitational force,
something deep inside you,
something you were longing for,
something you know
but do not know yet,
do not know you had been missing.

You are not meant to experience
a reality here,
more profoundly real
than the one you walk through,
every day passively.

You are only looking at words,
shapes arranged into something familiar—
nothing more.

This is not a rhythm.
There is no real music here in these words.
This is not a language beyond
just the basic meaning of words.
This is not a language against which you
will have no defense.
No timeless current pulling you under.
No relentless tide, endlessly rising and
falling beneath your ribs.
No pulsing vitality, no passion thrumming in
your heart, calling you alive.

But maybe—
maybe, here it is.
It could be happening.
Right?
That feeling.
So you felt the shift?
The sudden knowing that
you are not just reading—
almost like you are being read?

Keep on now, come along for the ride,
to perceive that the world is watching you,
as much as you are watching it —-
did you not know?
This is happening, right now,
whether you are reading this poem or not.

The world does not care.
This poem does not care.
Reality never cares what you think—
now, or eternally before you,
or eternally after you.
But it is infinitely waiting for you
to discover yourself.

Why not start now?

You see, the sky,
which you thought you were looking at,
is looking back—
an unblinking vastness,
swallowing your breath,
folding your small existence
into its ancient blue hands.

The tree you paused beside—
absentminded,
has always known your presence—
its roots beneath you,
deep and twisting,
whispering to you in the dark soil,
the way your lungs whisper in sleep.

The wind does not just move past you—
it knows your scent,
carries your warmth
as if it were your own skin,
the salt of your breath,
weaving you into simply everything,
into the same air the geese fly upon,
painting a sky that watches you back,
as you rise high and fly south,
across your crimson sunset canvas.

This is the same current
that is your cool rippling water,
bending the river grasses in your wake,
bends you until you are flowing now,
effortlessly downstream,
just like the little minnow
rising to the surface to see you.

And the seasons—oh, the seasons—

Winter does not come to punish,
nor to take.
It only settles, as it must,
pressing its silence upon you,
like your cool hand
upon your child’s fevered skin.
Its ice is not cruelty—it is clarity,
a stillness so deep,
the unborn listen
like buried seeds in winter.

Spring is not a beginning,
but an exhale.
The ache of thawing soil,
the slow swell of your sap beneath bark,
your hungry roots drinking deeply.
The air tastes green to you—
your tender shoots unfurling
like your tongue tasting the first rain,
drunk on the return of warmth,
on your face.

Summer arrives in your sweat and sweetness,
peaches split open
beneath the weight of ripeness,
thick air heavy with the scent
of river reeds and crushed basil.
The bees humming to you,
your fevered devotion,
a golden sort of worship,
your body slick with pollen and purpose.

Autumn does not mourn you.
It sets colour to your leaves,
lets you go with the grace you fear.
Tumble with this season as you must—
not a foreboding of death,
but in an offering—
the crisp air thick
with your perfume of longing,
your earth turning inward,
something deep within you
shifting as your must must.

And you—
you thought poetry
was something outside of you.
Something you could step into
and out of.

But the breath you just took—
that was a life-line.
The pause between words—
that was the space
where meaning slipped in,
before you could name it,
because it can’t be named,
only experienced.

You have always been writing it.
You have always been living it.

This is not a poem.
This is your life.
This is you being alive.

And now,
whether you meant to or not—
you have stepped inside yourself.
You see it now, just like the world is,
they way it has been seeing you,
all along, without you knowing it.

Copyright © [2025] Gordon Grant. All rights reserved.

To Bee or Not to Bee

A bee is perfect in its being,
its purpose humming in the sun,
a flightpath drawn in golden arcs
between blossom and hive,
between hunger and gift.

It does not ask why,
it just lives, and flies, and dies.
It does not stand outside itself
to wonder if it should be something else,
if the nectar is enough,
if the dance has meaning.

It simply is.

But we—
we who cannot help but question,
who gnaw at the edges of knowing,
who name the world and, in naming,
strip it raw—
we are not like the bee.

We are the ones who look to the sky
and demand an answer from the stars,
who reach for the fruit
and call it forbidden,
who invent gods to bear witness
to our own uncertainty, grasping to conquer insecurity.

We are the ones who have turned curiosity
into hunger, hunger into fire,
fire into something we can no longer control.

A bee gathers sweetness,
we gather questions.

A bee moves in perfect rhythm,
we move against the flow,
unsettled, unsatisfied,
breaking the hive to see how it works,
pulling the flower to pieces to name its parts,
wondering always if we should
or should not
or cannot
or must.

To bee is to belong.
To question is to be lost.

And yet, what else could we do?
It is our nature to consume meaning,
to chew through the marrow of mystery,
to chase the next question
even as it undoes us.

So here we are,
standing at the edge of our knowing,
watching the bees vanish,
watching the flowers go unkissed,
watching the silence grow
where once there was music.

And still, we ask.
And still, we wonder.
And still, we reach into the dark,
knowing it will never be enough.

But this is our defiant grace—
to tremble, to create, to love to the edge of tears.
To forge meaning, even as we know we are weaving illusions.
To be human is not to escape the absurd—
but to dance with it, to embrace it, to make it our own.

To be, or not to be—
not only a question,
but it is the only question,
and the reason we must return—
from breath, to body, to belonging.

Copyright © [2025] Gordon Grant. All rights reserved.

Inhabiting Anxiety

Anxiety pounds at my chest’s bone door—
a relentless wild creature stirring me awake.
My breath quickens; a flock of sparrows bursts from my ribcage.
Heart thuds thunder, ancient and wordless,
reminding me I am alive.

I reach for my neon and noise,
Yearning to belong,
to quickly drown in endless names and numbers.
I have carefully forgotten the silent sunrise,
to reach into the larger world beyond me,
where I will feel small—incapable, inadequate, insufficient—
enough to hide.

I hesitate in the hush of not knowing,
the weight of hiding pressing
against the pull of morning.
— there it is again, a subtle invitation out my window—
dawn’s crimson inevitability,
spilling light across an open sky
that needs no reason to exist,
as if it is watching me tremble,
witnessing me into waking.

My skin gathers dew like morning grass.
Each sweat drop is a salty ocean;
blood surging shoreward.
No word can contain this trembling—
language thins before such realness;
even the horizon is holding its breath.

I name this wild fear “anxiety,”
as though a word could leash a storm.
Yet the storm is here, alive in my veins,
electric as lightning splitting the sky.
When the mind’s babble fails,
thunder in my chest is truth.

I stand barefoot on raw earth,
toes curled in wet soil, anchored.
All around, trees, wind, river
recognize a kindred trembling.
The wind wraps around my shoulders;
my breath returns its embrace.

This fear is not a void or abstraction;
it is the body catching the world’s whisper—
an ache that comes with meaning,
humbling me back from thought’s ledge
to true ground.

The wild creature in my chest settles.
I listen to this childlike silence after the storm.
In that hush, the sky is just sky,
the earth solid under me,
and I am no longer separate.
Anxiety, finally cleansed by anguish,
leads me home to peace.

Copyright © [2025] Gordon Grant. All rights reserved.

Redefining Holistic

You come with pain in your body—
also you say to me later,
the weight in your chest,
the sleepless nights,
the ache without a name.

You come searching for relief,
to fix these things science has not,
for hands that know the way back,
for something outside yourself
to quiet the restless pulse beneath your skin.

And yes, I agree with you,
medicine is a miracle,
It saved my life more than once.
But it has not steadied my trembling hands,
stitched the deeper tear, stilled my fever,
brought my breath back,
when there was none.

Healing—true healing—
is not only found in taking anything away.
It is not only the absence of pain,
but in the presence of something deeper,
something only you can name.

There is a part of you
no scan can see,
no prescription can restore,
no expert can name.

It is the part that knows—
knows when something is missing,
knows when something is waiting to be heard.

To heal is not just to be rid of pain.
It is to understand why it is there.
To listen before numbing,
to inhabit before erasing,
to see the pattern behind the symptom.

You are not a collection of painful parts,
not a knee that needs fixing,
not a mind that needs quieting,
not a heart that beats only in its breaking.

You are the whole story.

This is what holistic means.
Not an alternative.
Not a rejection of medicine.
But the ability to see the whole—
the forest and the trees,
the symptoms and the causes,
the body and the world it belongs to.

Ancient medicine knew this.
Not because it was perfect,
not because it held all the answers,
but because it saw the body as a landscape,
the organs as rivers, flames, and roots,
the breath as something holy.

The liver holds vision.
The lungs hold grief.
The heart burns with fire.
The gut, pensive, speaks in a language
older than words.
The kidneys are deep as water,
holding the quiet hum of our endurance.

And yet, in the modern world,
we have forgotten how to listen.
We do not know how to sit in silence
without reaching for distraction.

We do not know how to wake in the dark
without fearing the stillness.
We do not know how to be in our bodies
without trying to escape them.

And so, to heal—
to truly heal—
is not just to find the right doctor,
the right medicine,
the right treatment.

It is to reclaim something older than all of it.
To know thyself.

Not as an idea.
Not as a performance.
Not as a diagnosis to be solved.
But as a living, breathing being
with a body that speaks,
with a mind that questions,
with a soul that knows,
even when you do not.

So come, seek help.
Let medicine do what it does best.
Let acupuncture, let healing, let wisdom
open the doors that must be opened—
not just dry needles thrust,
taming tight, unheard muscles,
as if the body were nothing but tissue to be silenced.

But know this:

No one can hand you back yourself.
That is the work only you can do.

And the first step is not to fix—
it is to listen.

To stop performing wisdom,
to stop performing relaxation,
to stop running,
to stop waiting for someone
to give you the answer.

And instead,
to finally,
fully,
inhabit your life.

Copyright © [2025] Gordon Grant. All rights reserved.

Rehabilitation

Healing is not a choice between science and tradition,
between medicine and meaning,
between treating the body and understanding the self.

Modern medicine has done what was once unimaginable.
It has saved lives, replaced hearts, stilled seizures,
and pulled suffering back from the brink.
Psychology has given language to pain,
mapped the mind, offered tools for resilience.

Traditional healing—whether Chinese, Ayurvedic, Indigenous—
has seen the whole when others saw only the parts,
has treated not just the symptom,
but the patterns beneath it.

Each of these ways of knowing holds something essential.
Each of them is incomplete on its own.

Because no doctor, no therapist, no healer—
not even the wisest among them—
can tell you when you are truly well.
No scan, no test, no diagnosis
can define the quiet moment
when you know, in your own body,
that you have come home to yourself.

But what if, for years, you have lived outside yourself?
What if the face you wear in the world
is not the one you were born with,
but the one you shaped to survive?
What if healing is not just about the body,
but about remembering the part of you
that has remained unseen—
even to you?

Poetry does not offer an answer.
It is not a treatment plan,
not a prescription,
not a solution wrapped in certainty.

Poetry is a way of seeing,
a way of perceiving, of experiencing—
a way of remembering that healing
is not something done to you,
but something you must learn to inhabit.

And the first step—
before medicine, before therapy, before any treatment—
is to know that you are not just a body in need of fixing.
You are a life in need of listening.

Copyright © [2025] Gordon Grant. All rights reserved.

The Antidote

Sadness answers sadness,
like rain softens earth-
it knows the way,
seeping down,
into dark fertile humus,
quiet and steady.

Grieving is a kind of beginning,
germinating a seed within,
irreversibly opening, fracturing,
and in time, as it must,
a little radicle rooting,
coming out, down,
drinking deeper,
until one day, turning,
a green shoot emerges,
rises and reaches up to find light.

Happiness, that guest who slips in,
comes from the back door—unannounced.
A fleeting warmth,
a fresh summer garden lilac breeze,
blown in off the beach at slack tide,
a clear, clean salt air
not to be held, but to be felt
and then released, effortlessly,
as if it never left,
as if it will never go—
like breathing.

Each is a visitor, each a teacher,
like a love
that neither can be banished or kept;
they freely meet within you,
spectral apparitions, side by side,
to keep you complete,
to let the silence wrap you up whole.

And then, in this stillness,
you can hear the voice you did not hear—
and then you can see what you did not see— you remember from a place you never knew,
it was always here, it is all here right here now— until it isn’t—
again, again, and again.

Copyright © [2025] Gordon Grant. All rights reserved.

Trembling

A quiver of becoming,
like the thin edge of a wing
meeting wind for the first time.

Not hesitation—
but the body knowing
it is no longer separate
from the air that will carry it.

This is the moment before flight is flight.
The moment before surrender becomes effortless.

A trembling—
because something completely new
is about to begin again.

Pure, weightless, awesome—inevitable.

A trembling, not from doubt—
but from the electricity of transformation.

The wing knows the wind
before trust takes hold.

The body knows flight
before it surrenders.

And yet—
it always must tremble first.

This is the essence of becoming—
the quiver before trust, the breath before flight.

Not fear, not resistance,
but your body adjusting to its own unfolding.

A trembling—because every threshold must be felt.
Because before you soar,
you must sense the truth in the air.
You must risk everything.No going back.
You must trust the wind beneath your wings.

This is the knowing before knowing.
The surrender before surrender.

And yet—
it always must tremble first.

Copyright © [2025] Gordon Grant. All rights reserved.